Opening article
Anthropic has announced updates to Claude for Financial Services. The platform now includes a native Excel plug-in and new real-time market connectors. Additionally, it offers pre-built skills for financial modeling, comp analysis, and earnings reports.
We're expanding Claude for Financial Services with an Excel add-in, additional connectors to real-time market data and portfolio analytics, and new pre-built Agent Skills, like building discounted cash flow models and initiating coverage reports.
These updates build on Sonnet 4.5’s state of the art performance on financial tasks, topping the Finance Agent benchmark from Vals AI at 55.3% accuracy. They augment Claude’s intelligence with solutions for time-consuming but critical financial work, built into preferred industry tools.
We’re releasing Claude for Excel in beta as a research preview. This allows users to work directly with Claude in a sidebar in Microsoft Excel, where Claude can read, analyze, modify, and create new Excel workbooks. Claude provides full transparency about the actions it takes: it tracks and explains its changes and lets users navigate directly to the cells it references in its explanations.
Claude for Excel is now in beta as a research preview for Max, Enterprise, and Teams users. We’ll collect real-world feedback from 1,000 initial users before rolling the feature out more broadly. To join the waitlist, click here .
With our GenAI-ready data offerings, we continue to support our customers in their AI evolution—enriching our data via a semantic layer and delivering it through Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers and Smart APIs. Our partnership with Anthropic makes Moody’s vast data estate accessible directly where our customers are innovating.
This means that Claude can discuss how a spreadsheet works, modify it while preserving its structure and formula dependencies, debug and fix cell formulas, populate templates with new data and assumptions, or build new spreadsheets entirely from scratch.
Claude for Excel adds to our existing integrations with Microsoft’s applications. In the Claude apps, Claude can also create and edit files, including Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint slides, and connect to Microsoft 365 to search for files, emails, and Teams conversations. Select Claude models are also available in Microsoft Copilot Studio and Researcher agent.
Connectors provide Claude with direct access to external tools and platforms. In July , we added connectors for S&P Capital IQ, Daloopa, Morningstar, and PitchBook. We’re adding new connectors that give Claude immediate access to more information in real time:
This update demonstrates the increasing specialization of general-purpose AI models into distinct industry verticals like finance through native workflow integrations and domain-specific tools.